Jay Leno’s upcoming visit to the Woodward Dream Cruise has been three years in the making.

Well, really, it has been 61 years in the making.

Leno, an avid car collector and returning attendee of the Dream Cruise, will be coming to metro Detroit to see the thousands of cool cars lining Woodward, but he will also be here to pick up — and tell some stories about — his 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car, an experimental coupe built by Chrysler. The car is powered by a turbine engine and coated in a glowing orange coat of paint over its swoopy, sleek body. There were 55 of them made, and Chrysler rolled them out as a sort of publicity stunt.

Eventually, Chrysler decided it didn’t want to take the car to market and rolled them back, destroying most of them. Only nine of them still survive. Six of them are in museums. Chrysler owns two. The other belongs to Jay Leno.

Stay dry: Prepare for rain: Showers likely through Dream Cruise weekend

According to Leno’s friend, Steve Lehto, the cars ran on any liquid that burned: “You can drive these things on kerosene, diesel, palm heating oil, Chanel No. 5, vodka, tequila.”

Lehto, an attorney with a law office in Southfield and also a successful car-law-related YouTube channel with over 500,000 subscribers, has written a whole book about the Turbine Car, featuring a forward from Leno himself. The two have been friends for years, but it began with Leno poking fun at him on his late-night show, “The Tonight Show,” for a different book he had written, called “Death’s Door,” which had been advertised as a good Christmas present. Leno joked that the title was too morose for a Christmas gift, and moved on.

Lehto found it funny, and sent a copy of “Death’s Door” to Leno, along with a manuscript for his book about the Turbine Car, knowing he was a car enthusiast, on a whim. Leno called him, interested in the manuscript, and they sparked a friendship over a fascination with the experimental vehicle.

Eventually, Leno convinced Chrysler to sell him one of the nine remaining Turbine Cars.

Lehto and Leno kept in touch over the years, with Lehto even flying to California to take the car for a spin, but contact was sporadic and intermittent, Lehto said.

That is, until Leno called three years ago with a problem: The engine in his Turbine Car had completely failed. Kaput.

“He said he had tried everybody he could think of to fix the car,” Lehto said. Not even Leno’s own team of automotive experts could fix it. Leno wanted to know if Lehto knew anyone who might be able to make it run again.

“There’s only one thing I can think of that we haven’t talked about yet,” Lehto remembers saying. “The guy who is like the godfather of (the Turbine Car) was named Sam Williams.”

Williams, a celebrated engineer known for his work on turbine engines, left Chrysler in the ’60s. He opened his own business, Williams International, in Walled Lake soon after, bringing a number of the original Turbine Car engineers with him. Nowadays, Williams International specializes in jet engines on military contracts, and they are certainly not in the business of repairing antique cars.

See it all: How to make the most of 2024 Woodward Dream Cruise: When it starts, where to park, events

But Lehto said whatever brainpower went into building the Turbine Car in the 1960s went to Williams International, and if anyone could help Leno, it was them, he said.

Leno asked him whether he knew anyone who worked there.

“Yeah, my brother works there,” Lehto remembers saying.

After a little hemming and hawing, Lehto said, Williams International agreed to take Leno’s car and fix it as long as it didn’t disrupt their normal workflow.

For three years, Lehto’s brother and other engineers at Williams International worked to put the car back together after Leno had it shipped to them in crates. They 3D-printed parts in steel. They remade parts that haven’t been manufactured in decades. They rallied together long-retired engineers from the ’60s who worked on the initial Turbine Cars.

And three years later, as the product of hours of late-night and weekend maintenance, Leno’s Turbine Car started running and driving last week, Lehto said. On Saturday, he’s coming to pick it up.

Lehto said it’s the nature of the car community to come together for a project like this.

“Everybody was helping on this,” he said. “It’s true of a lot of car communities where people who rally around a particular car are happy to share their knowledge, share their expertise and even happy to share their parts.”

You might think car collectors get greedy, Lehto said, but the saga to rebuild Leno’s ride has been an exercise in sharing.

“If you’ve got one of these cars, you would think you’d hang on to your parts, like ‘Don’t touch my stuff I might need it!’ ” Lehto said. “But no, they’re happy to help because they want to see another car stay on the road.”

News reporter Liam Rappleye can be reached at LRappleye@freepress.com

MILWAUKEE — A major rise in car break-ins has the community asking for answers. On Friday, Milwaukee city leaders addressed what is being done to fix the rise in crime.

In the last month alone, the city has seen a 30% jump in car break-ins — and that’s only counting the incidents that have been reported to police.

Mayor Cavalier Johnson, alongside representatives from MPD and the Common Council, came to the table to address the issue.

Officials are asking for residents to report any and all crimes they see and to be careful storing their belongings in their cars.

“I’m going to call on strict accountability, strict accountability on those criminal actions,” said Mayor Johnson.

The mayor emphasized that residents, specifically, should not leave any firearms inside vehicles.

Watch: City leaders address rising rate of carjackings, break-ins in Milwaukee

City leaders address car-related crimes

“If you are a gun owner, do not leave your gun in the car. Thieves are often looking for weapons to steal and then go and perpetuate crimes in other parts of the city.”

Milwaukee Police Inspector, David Feldmeier, says MPD is allocating more resources to address the crime concerns in the city.

“We are following up on several leads in the downtown area on carjacking, and auto thefts and we are constantly looking for more information.”

Feldmeier said most reports are of groups of teens breaking into these cars.

Common Council President Jose Perez called for changes in the juvenile justice system to keep young people from repeating the same crimes over and over again.

“We have to create a better accountability method for all the entities— probation, parole, the court system,” said Perez. “Everyone involved, we gotta step it up and we gotta do something differently. It can’t be business as usual because that’s gotten us to the point that we’re at now.”

According to MPD, there were 24 arrests for entry to locked vehicles and 135 arrests for carjacking from January 1, 2024, to August 15, 2024.

There were 267 carjackings and 2,047 entries to autos from January 1 to August 15 in 2023, compared to 337 carjackings and 1,878 entries to autos in 2024 during the same period.

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Minneapolis — Nothing gets past Minneapolis Metro Transit bus driver Jayne Arendt-Verhelst on her bus.

But last month, Arendt-Verhelst noticed a problem outside of it. Her bus was approaching an intersection when she saw a woman standing in the middle of the street waving her down. Even though the woman wasn’t at a bus stop, Arendt-Verhelst broke policy, pulled over and let her board.

“When I opened up the door, that’s when I really saw her,” Arendt-Verhelst told CBS News. “I saw her from head to toe and I was just like, wow.”

The woman, who appeared to be homeless, wasn’t wearing any shoes.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like walking around with bare feet on the hot pavement,” Arendt-Verhelst said. “And just, nobody sees you. She’s just kind of invisible, you know?”

But she was not invisible to Arendt-Verhelst, who immediately took the shoes off her own feet and gave them to her.

“I knew that you’re not supposed to drive in your socks, it’s a big no-no, but I couldn’t help it,” said Arendt-Verhelst, who has been a bus driver with Metro Transit for 18 years.

After her good deed, she contacted a supervisor from the bus to inform her of the unplanned stop.

“And I told her what I did. And she (the supervisor) said, ‘Well, you don’t have far back to the garage, so continue.’ I’m like, ‘OK,’” Arendt-Verhelst recounted.

Several riders witnessed that moment, but perhaps no one was more touched by it than passenger Sarah Seldon, who had been homeless before and knew how meaningful a simple kindness can be.

“It really, like, affected me because it was like, oh my gosh, she sees this woman,” Seldon said.

Often, we’re told to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. But in certain moments, it’s even more important to let that someone stand in ours.

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